Someone Else's Stories
by Stunt Muppet
Summary: The lives of toys are all about stories - always someone else's.


"Psst. _Pssst._ Hey, Buzz."

Jessie's voice nudged him into semi-consciousness; a long and energetic day of play had left most of them on the floor that night, with Bonnie too tired to assemble them just the way she wanted them on her bedsheets and pillows, so he wasn't quite sure where Jessie had actually been.

"Buzz! Wake up." She gave his shoulder another tug.

"What is it?" He worried, briefly. When she'd first arrived at Andy's she'd hated the dark, even the half-dark of Andy's room with all its open windows; they'd all stayed up with her most nights so she'd know there was someone else still there, that they wouldn't be gone in the morning. The years had mostly eased the fear - she didn't even mind Andy's toy chest so much after a while - but maybe she wanted company again in a brand new house.

"C'mon. There's something I've gotta show you." She was grinning this time, and trying not to, and he was on alert for an entirely different reason now. You never could tell just what she had on her mind when she was hiding a grin like that.

She headed for the door, tiptoeing as fast as she could to quiet her steps, and beckoned him to follow. He almost had to run to keep up with her as she bounded down the stairs to the big couch in front of the TV; nobody slept in the downstairs rooms.

"Well?" he asked as she perched on the seat of the couch, next to the remote. "So what is it?"

She folded her arms, swaggering ever so slightly, and clicked the "On" button with one snappy step - and behind her the screen flicked on, displaying a brightly-colored cartoon with stars whizzing by in the background.

The figure in the foreground was very familiar.

"I had a cartoon?" he asked, sitting down on the edge of the seat.

"Mm-hmm." She'd been suppressing the full extent of her grin before; her smile pulled at her cheeks, just on the threshold of a giggle. Behind her the two-dimensional Buzz Lightyear swooped across the screen, scooping up a three-eyed alien before something huge with long, paper-white teeth took a bite out of it. His voice - he wasn't paying too much attention to the words - was loud and pronounced, every word emphasized and jutting out like his lantern jaw (which he hadn't thought was quite that, er, prominent).

The voice was exactly his, and it occurred to him that his own voice must belong to someone else, some human being behind the ink and pencil.

"Where'd you find this?" he asked, as she sat down next to him, feet kicking.

"Trixie told me about it. She knew she'd seen you from somewhere," she added, poking at him. "Lookit you! You're _two-dimensional_! Ha!"

Jessie had apparently been planning this surprise for a while, because the entire first season of _Buzz Lightyear of Star Command_ was all lined up in the home DVR, and she was far too excited about her discovery to sit through an entire episode. She flipped back and forth, from episode to episode, excitedly telling him that, look, in _this_ one, you and your team have to destroy Zurg's power source, and in this one the robot gets a virus and almost destroys your spaceship, and here's the big season finale where you're stuck on the Negative World and you think your ship exploded. And she pointed at the screen when he – the him in the show – swooped in to save the day, and laughed at all the impossible stunts he could perform when he didn't need a child to hold him up while he flew.

The clock on the wall read just past 2 a.m. by the time the opening credits started to scroll by for the final episode, and Jessie had, for the moment, spent her considerable excitement, her knees drawn up to her chest."Do you remember any of this?" she asked.

"What, you mean the show?"

"Yeah." The smile remained, but it was smaller and closed. "Woody told me, when he first met you, you were..." She looked back at the television, more curious than avoidant. "Well, he told me you didn't know you weren't really a Space Ranger."

He didn't quite know how to reply. He hadn't thought about back then in a very long time – Woody hadn't mentioned it for years. Even after he'd been reset nobody had wanted to mention it very much. "Well, no. No, I didn't. I thought I'd landed on a hostile alien planet for a few days there."

"Did you remember being him?" She glanced back at him; on the screen Cartoon Buzz was standing straight and tall and sure and delivering what seems to be the moral of the day. Buzz wasn't prone to too many moments of self-doubt even now, but there was a very different sort of certainty that came with being Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger. "I mean all the episodes and stuff. Like, 'Oh, back when me and the robot guy saved the aliens from the _evil_ Zurg's alien slime monster!'." She put her hands on her hips, puffed out her chest, thrust out her chin, and spoke in a much more officious and blustery voice than he remembered having. That couldn't have been what he really sounded like. Was it? It couldn't be.

"Um. Well." She was still giggling a little over her Carton Buzz impression, and he had the sudden urge to clear his throat and scoot as far away from his television counterpart as possible. Now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure. He didn't spend too much time reminiscing about his first days at Andy's house. Why would he want to?

"I don't..." he began, trying to backtrack to the very beginning, the minutes when he first woke up. The trouble was he didn't remember waking up, not like that – it was as if, when he'd arrived in Andy's room, it was another morning, with many mornings before. "There were...facts, things I knew – I knew I had a mission. I…remembered getting into my spaceship and taking off. I remember all the terrible things I thought some other toy did. But they weren't..." He wanted to say they weren't _real_, but it was a different kind of not-real than the stories Andy or Bonnie told. Because those stories were real in every way that was important – they were what you were for, they were alive and vivid and made sense and ended happily. They were what you stepped out of to go back to the smaller, simpler world, and in your memory they were interlaced.

"They weren't like playtime," he continued. "They were just things I knew. Like, them, the aliens, I didn't recognize them," he said, gesturing back to the TV, but Jessie didn't look back. "I should have, if I remembered everything. Right?"

"Guess so." She leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. The episode ended, and the screen shifted back to the blue boxes of the DVR menu, with some guide program chattering away in the background. Neither of them moved to shut off the TV.

"I didn't remember anything before Emily," she said, not looking at him. "I didn't even know about Woody's Roundup until Al bought me. I was just Emily's cowgirl. And that was enough, but...y'know, maybe if I'd known, before...maybe if I'd had somebody else to be, it wouldn't have been so hard."

What had it been like for her, he wondered, moving to another new home? She'd seemed to handle it well; she was even prepared to go up in the attic before they'd moved. But she'd been Andy's by then as long as she'd been Emily's.

"If it makes you feel any better," he replied, turning to her, "I'd rather have been Andy's toy from the start. I'd rather have never thought I was him."

"But at least –" she drew her arms across her chest but kept her voice level, and still didn't look his way. "At least then if your kid grows up and forgets you, or throws you away, everything you are isn't gone."

He put a hand on her shoulder, and it seemed to snap her thoughts out of their downward spiral, because then she managed to look back at him.

"Jessie, there were thousands of dolls out there like you. And each one of them looks and sounds like the Jessie on TV, and says the same thing when you pull on her pull-string." He gave the ring in her back a very light tug, just enough to make her giggle – at least it was a smile, however fleeting. "You're the only one who had Emily."

And she managed a little smile again, and rested an arm around his shoulders, and said "Thanks, Buzz."

They stayed quiet for a while, not really watching the TV screen and not really listening to the chatter of the announcer, until Buzz cleared his throat and said "Um, shouldn't we be getting back upstairs?"

"Are you kidding?" She clapped him around the shoulder. "There's a whole 'nother season of your show left to watch! Don't you want to see what else you get up to, spaceman?"


End file.
